Taipei 101

Taipei 101, formerly Taipei Financial Center, office building in Taipei, Taiwan (Republic of China). Designed by C.Y. Lee & Partners, a local architectural firm, the skyscraper has 101 stories and reaches a height, including the spire, of 1,667 feet (508 metres). At the time of its official opening in October 2004, it was the world’s tallest building, having surpassed the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In 2007 it was exceeded by the Burj Khalifa, then being built in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. While under construction, Taipei 101 was known as Taipei Financial Center.

The lowest aboveground floors of Taipei 101 house a luxury atrium shopping mall. Most of the floors above the mall are devoted to office space. The public observatories are on floors 88 to 91, with an indoor observatory on 89 and an outdoor observatory on 91. At a height of 1,285 feet (392.8 metres), the outdoor observatory was the highest in the world at the time of completion. Another indoor observatory, not open to the public, is on the top (101st) floor and is 1,437 feet (438 metres) high.

atrium in Taipei 101 buildingAtrium in the mall of the Taipei 101 building, Taipei, Taiwan.Geoff Tompkinson/GTImage.com

Construction of Taipei 101 began in 1999. The structure was topped out in 2003, and work was completed in 2004. The largest section of the building, between the base and the spire, consists of eight modules, or groupings, of eight stories each (eight being an auspicious number in Chinese numerology). The building also expresses its distinctively Chinese character in its resemblance to a stalk of bamboo or an elongated pagoda.

The structural system is core plus outrigger, with 16 steel columns in the core and 8 steel “supercolumns” at the perimeter. All columns are filled with concrete up to floor 62. Massive steel outrigger trusses link the core and perimeter columns every eighth floor. The building’s most noteworthy structural element is its main tuned mass damper, which can be viewed from the indoor public observatory. The damper is a steel weight of 660 metric tons (728 short tons), suspended between the 92nd and 87th floors at the building’s centre. Under conditions of seismic stress or typhoon-force winds, the sway of the damper tends to counteract (dampen) any sway of the building.